Grey Metrics

How To Use Google Keyword Planner Like A Pro In 2020

Ace Keyword Planner

What Is Keyword Planner?

To know the number of searches made on Google for a particular search term. 

Marketers rely on Google’s free tool, Keyword Planner to understand search volumes for a particular geography & make advertising plans 

To access keyword planner, you need to have a Google Ads account.

After you set-up an account, Go to Google Ads → Tools & Settings → Planning → Keyword Planner 

If you have created a new account, you will see a range beside the keywords instead of an exact number. (Eg: 10-100, 1000 – 10,000) 

 If you already run ads on Google, you will be able to see the exact number of searches 

Ways To Use

What you can accomplish with Keyword Planner

  • Find New Keywords
  • Get Search Volumes
  • Searches by Device, Locations
  • Seasonal Fluctuations
  • Power your SEO 

How To Find New Keywords

  1. Enter root keyword
  2. Competitor website

1) Root Keyword

It’s important for new businesses & starters to understand the search landscape. 

The information (new keywords that people search for in your business segment) comes in handy to plan for future marketing 

Start by clicking on “Discover new keywords”

Enter a keyword that is important for your business. Eg – marvel comics. 

Click on Get Started & let the results flow in

The search volume is in. You will see data for a 12 month period broken down by month. If there is a seasonal fluctuation, the data will be easily visible.

Hover on each of the months to drill down into data by each month

Blue represents entire search volume (All devices) & Red represents mobile volume

New suggestions of keywords are shown below under “broaden your search”

Add a suggestion to increase the number of keywords to find. In this example, I have added “superhero comics”. 

The number of keyword ideas took a drastic jump from 796 to 2107

 2. Competitor Website

Another way of finding new keywords is by using a website link. Ideally this needs to be a competitor. 

Type in the website URL & search for keywords on the entire site. 

If you have zeroed in on a page that you want to use as a seed, type in the page.

I’m going to use the comics page on marvel’s site to get new keyword ideas.

This way, I can also view all the keywords for the website

Keywords related to the site will be displayed with search volumes that we have seen earlier. 

An important distinction to make here is that – It is easy to view and understand when the closely related keywords are grouped together. 

These are called Grouped Ideas. 

 Grouped ideas can give markters a broad overview of the kind of keywords.

Pro Tip – If you search for keywords from the entire site, you won’t be able to use Grouped Ideas.

Grouped ideas is only available when search is not an entire site (marvel.com vs marvel.com/comics – Comics page will show up the Grouped Ideas)

It’s important to be specific. Specific is terrific and gives out wonderful keyword data

Get Search Volumes

  • Add keywords
  • Get search volumes
  • Filter by Location
  • Filter by Device
  • Download 
  • Add to a campaign 

You can a) type in the keywords or b) upload a file with keywords to get search volume forecast

I’m going to add a few keywords to view search forecast in the United States.

Now that the volumes are available, let’s filter search volume by a state. 

Search By Device, Locations

Change location to get updated forecasts of search volumes

A further drill down by device, county & city name is possible

Seasonal Fluctuations (If you are in a seasonal business) can be estimated with the planner

Now that the keywords & search volumes by location are available, use these keywords to write content & boost your SEO

Pro Tip

  • KeywordTool.io – Alternative

Keywordtool.io is an alternative to Google Keyword Planner. (This is a paid tool with a limited free version)

The free version, however can pick up 750 keywords and is mighty useful.

This nifty useful tool picks data from Google auto-suggest to generate long tail keywords that may not be directly available on Keyword Planner. 

  • SEMRush & Ahrefs

 Most professional marketers also use tools such as SEMRush & Ahrefs to uncover competitor keywords in tandem with Keyword Planner.

  • Login to SEMRush (On a Paid Plan)
  • Type in competitor URL

Go to Organic Research → Find keywords & URL’s are bringing the most traffic

  • Download keywords & upload to keyword planner

Marketers benefit by finding keywords that may not be visible on Keyword Planner. 

Analytics Dashboard

In order to make it easy for marketers to view content marketing efforts, data from Google Search Console & Google Analytics accounts can be connected to a single dashboard to view progress. How? With GreyMetrics.com

Your content marketing dashboard can look like this 

GreyMetrics puts all your marketing data together on one dashboard & can serve as a single source of truth for all of your marketing data.

Do you have any tips on how your agency uses keyword planner. Write to us and we will include your experience on our blog